A Blog by Margaret Pless

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Zoe Quinn, moments before exporting 20,000 #Gamergaters to Dubai in shipping containers. (credit: Eden of the East Wikia)

What’s happening, friends? Ah, nothin’; just browsing the internet about this latest trending thing called “#gamergate.” These dudes really seem to hate this woman I’ve never met, they make her sound like a camp monster. I made a list of some of the dumbest things #gamergaters actually believe about her.

5. Zoe Quinn slept her way to prominence in indie gaming.

According to #gamergate canon, allegations about Quinn’s sex life were the straw that broke the gamer’s back. Way back when Gjoni published thezoepost in August, the putative #gamergate read about Quinn’s relationship with Nathan Grayson, a Kotaku journalist and they all just flipped.

#gamergaters somehow believed Quinn’s relations with Grayson was tantamount to her sleeping with him to obtain a favorable review of Depression Quest. However Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest, and never published anything about Quinn in Kotaku once their relationship began. If Grayson had written anything about Zoe Quinn after beginning their relationship, the ethically culpable party would have been Grayson. But Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest, so no ethical breach occured.

Still, this spun out to create the wider myth that Zoe slept with more people (the “Five Guys” of which Eron wrote, and then even more people) as if each liason earned her Video Game Industry Points or something. I probably shouldn’t have written that though; in case someone makes a flash game.

4. Zoe Quinn exploits her supporters for personal gain.

This one is a favorite of Lawfag’s and was a popular mission in the #burgersandfries chat room back in mid-August. The primary evidence cited in the logs (as I covered here) was some successful crowdfunding campaigns conducted by Quinn, some about games and others not (one was to replace a stolen pocketbook.)

Suspicious of her success at raising money, #gamergaters were eager to prove Quinn had embezzled donations… so they tried to get her audited by the IRS. But during his extended Q&A Gjoni didn’t have any evidence of financial misconduct on Quinn’s part, and was reduced to criticizing her for doing things like negotiating contracts and having industry friends I mean, arrogance and rank nepotism.

To date I’ve found no evidence that Zoe Quinn is somehow stealing the funds people give to her as donations. The semantics of that are essentially weird. And as Save the Queen noted on We Hunted the Mammoth, Depression Quest costs nothing on Steam. (You may donate money if you choose.) This is hard to reconcile with #gamergater’s conception of Quinn as greedy.

And it’s not just about money. According to this reddit thread from yesterday about my most recent exploits, Zoe Quinn is a manipulator and I’m her thrall.

She is good at manipulating easily manipulatable people. Don’t give her so much credit.

All she has to do is tell her followers who to hate and they jump. They pay her 3k a month for playing the victim and making nothing of any quality.

3. Zoe Quinn fakes the threats she receives, thus playing the victim.

This is probably definitely not true, unless the entire 2,500-page, 10-point type bulk of the IRC chatroom #burgersandfries (which was dedicated to harassing the holy hell out of Quinn) is fiction.

Which it’s not; the entire log was posted by pro-#gamergate folks to try and exonerate them, or prove that these comments were cherry-picking when the whole damn log was like that. The interview Eron Gjoni gave for #burgersandfries shows that they thought ZQ made shit up even then; e.g. about being mugged or with regards to past cases of harassment.

For a few days after #burgersandfries broke, #gamergate also tried to pass off the screencaps Quinn published as fake; as if she’d fabricated them herself in IRC using confederates. #gamergaters believe Quinn is capable of such devious cover-ups because #gamergaters themselves use the exact same tactics to cover their own asses.

2. #gamergate isn’t about Zoe Quinn (anymore)

Even today in 8chan, everybody’s happy to start a bandwagon hating on Zoe Quinn. Here’s a thread from 8chan about a blog post written by part-time internet attorney, full-time beserker MRA Mike Cernovich; where he screams Quinn’s legal name from the rooftops of the internet in response to my posting a photograph of his house on the internet yesterday; so this is very recent.

Cernovich and the rest of #gamergate immediately attack ZQ for something I did; Cernovich by publishing more court documents, like I expected he might and #gamergate by discussing all the reasons they never liked Zoe Quinn anyhow.

“This is why the nude photos of her younger and slimmer self were a favor to her. Was it worth it, Nathan?” – Anon, being a real creep (Source: 8chan)

And lest you think I’m cherrypicking, or that hating Quinn is somehow unusual for #gamergate, the thread goes on in this vein. Posting pictures of Zoe Quinn, unflattering photoshops of the same, discussing her appearance, weight, how ZQ makes one 8chan anon want to “blunt a kitten with a sledgehammer.”; it’s all in there! But #gamergate lacks this self-awareness, and would like to think Quinn is so over, even as they spout bile about her at that very moment.

“fuck off zoe. no-one fucking cares about you anymore. choke on my sage” – Anon, not caring about ZQ at all (Source:8chan)

1. Zoe Quinn killed a man

According to a photographer on Facebook, Zoe Quinn hired her to take pictures for a “softcore/ alt erotica” photo shoot in 2007. According to the photographer, whose name is Malorie Nasrallah, Quinn and she chatted; and during that conversation Quinn said she was attacked by a man and stabbed him in the face. There’s even a smoking gun:

You’ll notice that I summed it up pretty quickly, although Malorie’s piece is 1,350 words long. That’s because most of what she wrote is actually Malorie grousing about Zoe Quinn as a client.

By time I arrived in Albany, Zoe had cancelled one of the three shoots we had planned. She lived in a tiny apartment with her boyfriend / spouse / lover (I did not ask personal questions) and her roommate. I had been assured I could over night with them, and that they had room to accommodate a guest, and room to shoot in. They had neither. We ended up doing an impromptu shoot in the extremely crowded apartment, in the middle of the night, to try to save the shoot.

– Malorie Nasrallah, grousing

I understand why this might be frustrating. That certainly does sound unprofessional. But it sounds like Nasrallah’s poisoning the well: because Quinn did not perform to her professional standards at a photoshoot, this is supposed to lend credence to the claim Quinn stabbed someone.

While we tried to plan a shoot for the next day Zoe, and Co. chatted with me. She claimed to have stabbed a man – attempted rapist – in the face, who had grabbed her. She relayed to me no less than three other accounts of alleged violent assault. I will not share the details here, I feel that would be fundamentally indecent. I was alarmed at this, and I admit, by the time she made the claim that she stabbed a man in the face with a knife* and ran away, I was skeptical as well. Two claims involved alleged workplace incidents, and were her prime explanation for why she could not hold a job. I was mildly disconcerted, because true or false, these stories have good cause to make one uneasy. She also claimed to have reported nothing to police, or management at her work.

That was not all we discussed, we talked about modeling, the websites, and erotica/porn in general. It was what we both did for a living, and candid conversation on the subject was not unusual.

I believe that being told by someone that they stabbed a man (who shall remain nameless) at some point in the unspecified past is hearsay. But there are other reasons the story bugs me.

For example, I try to beware of excessive details. They usually imply that someone is lying, adding more and more details so that their story seems credible. And 80% of this account is about Zoe’s softcore porn shoot (what is this, fanfiction?); complaints of how totally unprofessional she was, it’s mostly excessive details designed to make one think ill of Zoe Quinn.

Nasrallah even writes that Quinn still owes her money for the services rendered & clearly dislikes her. You might call that a “conflicting interest”; she seems to care more about her own interactions with Quinn than anything about this proposed murder. Still she offers herself up as a “character witness”; because people who hate Zoe Quinn will obviously only tell the truth about her.

Then are the factual things. According to Nasrallah, ZQ went by the name “Valentine Locke”, so in reality all the facts here are about someone who called themselves “Locke” at the time. Nasrallah came into contact with ZQ after the fact; (“When I realized Locke was Zoe”) and only comes out with the story now, post-#gamergate.

The smoking gun is a mostly censored email exchange between Nasrallah and Locke/Zoe. These weren’t the first messages exchanged between the two, and Nasrallah gives us no sense of context to Locke’s/Zoe’s words because most of her prompting message is censored. So when Locke responds by discussing killing someone in self-defense we have no context for this message, save the one Nasrallah is telling us.

So basically this is a rumor, with no evidence, no dead body and no time frame. Just an undated email written by ZQ under an alias, allegedly boasting about having stabbed a rapist in the face (in self defense.) I wonder what Malorie is leaving out when she blacks out text that says “here am I allegedly saying I should have let her be murdered? etc.” I kind of wonder if it isn’t some rape-apologetic handwaving about that poor nameless, mysterious man she wants to protect.

Eron Gjoni was promoting this libel on October 8, directly linking to Malorie’s accusations in this series of tweets.

This might be libel, since he’s CCing some of the popular names of #gamergate in these Tweets. And did Eron Gjoni just say Zoe Quinn makes false rape claims? Gross. Don’t let this guy into your social justice club; whatever he thinks theoretically, this is who he is when the rubber meets the road.

When we last left Eron Gjoni, he was…well actually, he was browsing this blog. My tracker shows the writer of thezoepost visiting my site every so often; Gjoni even typed his own name into this blog’s search engine. What a narcissist, huh?

So according to Eron lately, the Khaleesi of SJWs, Zoe Quinn (aka The Undoxxed, Queen of all Bees) has turned up again to unfairly torment him. Or maybe it’s just the consequences of his manipulative attempt to engineer the professional, personal, and romantic ruin of a woman who hurt his feelz catching up with him. Or maybe, it’s a lie designed to capatalize on #GamerGater’s hatred of all things Quinn to get him a month or two of rent money. Because I can’t find any proof that this lawsuit is actually happening.

Here’s the 411. According to Eron, his ex-girlfriend is suing him for his involvement in the #GamerGate hate mob which he gleefully incited & whose attention he continues to bask in. Here’s what he wrote on his own blog when he solicited the support of his #GamerGate bannermen:

Alright. Quick summary: I’m Eron. I made thezoepost wordpress that got banned from the internet for days until the internet finally gave up, and that revealed information to set the stage for what is now known as #gamergate. Zoe didn’t like that, and decided to abuse the courts, so I made a GoFundMe donation page to help with legal fees. For reasons that are as of yet unclear, GoFundMe took the page down while I was just shy of the $1800 goal.

Hmm. This lawsuit lacks the intricate detail I’ve come to expect from Gjoni. For example, with what crime has Gjoni been charged? Is it civil court, or a criminal matter? Did Quinn bring the matter to a state court or a federal one? Is there a case number or something I can look up? I’m asking because I’ve been looking around the internet and I can’t find anything to confirm Gjoni’s claims.

I’m not saying he’s a liar, although Gjoni has lied to me in the past. I’m saying that if Gjoni was really being sued, I’d expect another 10,000 word hurt-feelz blog post and a bunch of scanned pages from his ex’s lawyer. That’s kind of what Gjoni does when something he percieves as unfair happens to him. Confidential and ethical, he ain’t.

I contacted Zoe Quinn to confirm the allegations; but at press time she had not responded with a comment. Nor could any of my SJW friends hip to her scene confirm the allegations Gjoni’s making. I’ll update my post if she does. But let me let Eron finish his plea to send him your money via PayPal.

Within two hours, people donated a total $1,855. At which point, GoFundMe deleted the donations page for an unspecified ToS violation.

I emailed GoFundMe to ask if they at least refunded the money, and what the ToS violation was. They answered the financial query, but ignored the ToS query. They said the money was available in my WePay account (GoFundMe uses this as a backend). I checked the account, and it had $1689…

But again, they ignored my question as to why the page was taken down. I sent another email asking why the page was taken down, but they haven’t responded to it.

I will set up a paypal soon, and be super transparent about the donations coming in if people want to keep donating. I can probably eat up the remaining $165 myself, but I am curious to see what the community votes on donating the excess funds to if a bunch of those get raised.

Am I missing something here? What is so ethical about soliciting donations specifically from #GamerGaters to help you with your #GamerGate related legal fees? Is crowdfunding only ethical now when Eron Gjoni does it? And doesn’t the rapid response on their part prove Gjoni and #GamerGate are internet BFFS, whose favorite shared interest is hating his ex? Furthermore, why are the same #GamerGaters who were so keen on getting Gjoni’s ex audited for tax fraud over her crowdfunding history practically trampling each other to give Gjoni their thousands over GoFundMe and PayPal without a shred of evidence that Gjoni’s actually being sued? And how bad do you have to be to get your campaign kicked off GoFundMe in less than a day? That’s the same web site which crowdfunded a six-figure pension for the cop who shot Mike Brown.

Let me explicate on why this bothers me.

Before Zoe Quinn released her screencaps of the chatroom #burgersandfries, Eron Gjoni gave an interview there. One of the questions he was asked was about a crowdfunding campaign Quinn started when her pocketbook was allegedly stolen. Eron could not disprove that she was mugged, but still spoke at length about the amount of money she had recieved- several thousand dollars. But now when Eron needs money for a claim he can’t doesn’t prove (or doesn’t want to prove), a different standard applies. So why is it when Eron says he needs money, nobody questions his motives?

It’s very fishy, isn’t it?. This campaign is curiously timed with Gjoni’s departure from his job, and the cynic in me wonders if he’s just conning #GamerGaters for their money. Despite the use of #GamerGate buzzwords there’s nothing transparent about this donation drive. Unless Gjoni wants to release the name of his representation, I can’t imagine how he can prove the money’s being spent on a lawyer. Donating whatever extra amount he gets (or saying he will, at least) does little to clarify where exactly these “legal fees” are going.